A Studied Contention

Modern MBA has become one of my favourite longform business channels on YouTube. The videos are well-written and well edited. In the creator’s own words:

While most people understandably fixate on the analysis, Modern MBA episodes are an exercise of both analysis and presentation skills. Doing the analysis is one exercise, finding the right abstraction, perspective, and story to complement that analysis is another exercise. For industries and domains that I am not personally experienced in (e.g cardboard episode), it takes longer to do the analysis. It’s impossible to write about something you don’t understand. The key variable for each episode is how fast it takes me to really “get” the industry. Finding the balance of analysis and presentation for each episode is an exercise in itself. For industries that most people are familiar with, the analysis is easier but the presentation is much trickier (e.g Adidas episode) in storyboarding an episode that brings fresh perspective.

-From a reddit post/AMA by the creator

Man, I wish more creators thought this way. They go on to elaborate:

For example, in the Adidas video, it would have been unacceptable to waste everyone’s time restating common sense of “yes, Ultraboost was a popular shoe, Kanye wore them to one of his concerts, they went viral, and bam, the shoes sold very well and Adidas made a lot more money than before.” A 5 sentence section on Wikipedia would have told you the same thing. The same could have been said about DoorDash. If the entire video was regurgitating obvious facts of “drivers don’t get paid well, you have to tip, no money for food delivery companies”, I would have just not done it. My goal for each episode to bring some degree of original insight, balanced with information, context, metrics - all wrapped in one engaging story.

So whoever this person is, they’re clearly making the most out of their Ivy League MBA, right? Haha nope.

Don’t have an MBA.

The premise of Modern MBA is to demonstrate that traditional degrees like MBAs are not necessary when you can gain just as much, if not more practical / relevant knowledge online for free from people with real-world corporate experience than you ever would from textbooks.

Good business content should not be paywalled behind $100K+ tuition, academic institutions, and taught in echo chambers by out-of-date professors.

With that context, here’s a typical ModernMBA video:

Now that itself would be reason enough to recommend the channel. It’s so informative!

But recently, the channel has done a bit of a pivot. From the classic case study format, they’ve moved to something eerily resembling journalism:

This video has only a fourth of the usual view count, but I for one hope they keep going. This is a vice level of production from a standalone creator. Phenomenal!